Dvar Torah on Parshat Chayei Sarah

"It's all been said before, It's all been written in the book/Too much of nothing,nobody should look". Bob Dylan "Every dayevry day, every day I write the book." Elvis Costello There is a well-known narrative problem in this week's parsha. The story opens with the death and burial of Sarah. Her husband Abraham, after mourning her, turns to domestic matters; he asks his trusted servant Eliezer to leave the land of Canaan and return to Aram Naharayim - Mesopotamia - Abraham's birthplace, and there find and bring back a suitable wife for his son Isaac from among his kinsmen, and not from among the Canaanite nations that surround them. If he fails to do so, Abraham insists that Isaac NOT leave the land and go searching for a wife himself, but rather stay in Canaan and, if all else fails, marry a local girl. Eliezer sets out on his trip, and the Torah tells us that, as he approaches his destination, he prays for success. He asks God for a sign - let the girl who is destined to be Isaac's wife come to the well and offer water to him and his camels. Immediately, Rebecca comes to the well and, just as Eliezer had prayed for, she kindly offers water to him and his animals. Having found, with God's help, the right girl, who, besides passing the kindness-to-strangers-and-animals-test also turns out to be a kinswoman of his master Abraham, he goes with her to her home in order to arrange with her family her marriage to Isaac. Once he gets to her home, he retells the entire story to her family, and here we have the narrative weakness of the parsha. Rather than making do with a simple "And Eliezer told them all that had happened", or something along those lines, the Torah records Eliezer's entire retelling of the earlier narrative, starting with the charge he received from Abraham, and continuing with his journey to the well, his prayer to God, his meeting with Rebecca, her kindness, and his gratitude to God for answering his prayers. It is all told all over again, in repetitious and apparently unnecessary detail. The Midrash comments on the seemingly unnecessary repetition: "Rabbi Acha said: The every-day speech of the servants of our patriarchs is more precious before God than the Torah of the sons [of the patriarchs]. For behold, the parsha of Eliezer is repeated in the Torah, and yet many basic laws of the Torah are only briefly hinted at in the text!" It is a matter of speculation as to what precisely is so precious about Eliezer's speech - his emphasis on his loyalty to Abraham, his faith and reliance on God, how God so precisely and swiftly answered his prayers, his gratitude to God for doing so, or all of the above. Whatever the specific message might be that is so worthy of being repeated, what Rabbi Acha says about Eliezer's every-day speech as opposed to the later laws of the Torah is interesting. The comparison he makes between the length of this story and the brevity of the later legal material in the Torah, in which the every-day speech of even the servants of our forefathers is seen as superior to, and therefore more worthy of elaboration, than the laws of the Torah, underscores, I think, an interesting tension in the life of a religious person.The patriarchs and matriarchs lived in a world without sacred text - before the giving of the Torah. The spirituality in their lives was something that was experienced, lived, and shared at first-hand with others. Eliezer believed that he saw, in the way that Rebecca's appearance and behavior at the well answered his prayers, the hand of God in every-day life. It was a wondrous experience for him, and it was this experience, and the wonder he felt, that he then shared with her family, when he retold the story. It is this dynamic, the sharing with others of our sense of wonder and gratitude at the experience of God in our every-day lives, that the Torah takes pains to record. This is the precious speech of the servants of the patriarchs. We, on the other hand, live in a world of sacred text. We have already received the Torah, and are forced by the existence of that text to filter our spiritual experiences, to live them, and define them, through it. We are burdened by the text; our lives as Jews, our relationship with God, and with others, are delineated and circumscribed by it. Weighted down by this veritable mountain of sacred writ, commentary and super-commentary, we are in danger of experiencing our own lives at a distance, at a remove, through the pages of a book. Our focus is, perhaps, not on what we do, but on what it says we should do, and what it says about what it says we should do. And what it says about what we should say and feel about what we have done. Rabbi Acha is telling us that the Torah, by setting out its legal material briefly, while generously making space for Eliezer's experiences, is trying to relieve us, in some symbolic way, of the burden of text, and invite us into the more vivid spirituality of directly lived, and shared, religious experience. Eliezer's story - it's length, it's texture, it's narrative weight - is meant to be a model of a lived and shared spiritual life, a spiritual life rooted in real experiences in the real world, not in a book, nor in a legal system. The ability to see and share, and marvel at, and be grateful for, and speak about, the divine, the wondrous, the miraculous, that is present in our every-day lives, in our daily conversation, is of more value than a religiosity based on a loyalty to text, to theory, to a scriptural superstructure that, if not trimmed, might crush us. Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Shimon Felix